The area focuses on the different flavors of parallel and distributed systems and their applications. Parallel systems are considered both from the point of view of the parallelization of algorithms and of the operating systems designed to support parallel computation. Special computers characterized by high parallelism, such as GPUs, also fall within this scope. Quantum computers, being highly parallel computers by nature, are also an interesting emerging area of research in this domain.
For what it concerns distributed systems, research spans different types of computer networks and related applications, which range from traditional and softwarized network infrastructures to edge and cloud systems, mobile networks, IoT systems, cyber-physical systems, blockchains and distributed ledgers. These systems are studies from different perspectives, including architectures, communication protocols, design, development, and management techniques, and specific applications.
Specific research topics in this area are:
- Communication protocol engineering and network software engineering
- High-speed packet processing/forwarding
- High-performance computing
- (Micro)service orchestration and management
- Computing continuum
- Intelligent network management
- Formal methods for network protocols and network software
- Communication protocols and architectures for mobile networks
- Networking for distributed AI: collective offload and optimization
- Network softwarization
- Intelligent technologies applied to distributed applications
- Pervasive computing
- Blockchain and distributed ledgers
- Distributed software architectures for Internet-of-Things applications and services
- Distributed multi-model co-simulation architectures for digital twins
- Quantum computing algorithms
- Quantum machine learning
- Quantum computing applications (e.g., finance, car traffic optimizations)
- PE6_2 Computer systems, parallel/distributed systems, sensor networks, embedded systems, cyber-physical systems
- PE6_4 Theoretical computer science, formal methods, and quantum computing
- PE6_6 Algorithms, distributed, parallel and network algorithms, algorithmic game theory
- PE7_8 Networks (communication networks, sensor networks, networks of robots, etc.)